Why can’t we just ask our governments to spend more on research? Want some rich person to donate $100 billion on cancer research?

The US government and European governments could find that amount of money every year.

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declan_roberts 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The United States and world spend huge amounts of money on this, not even to mention the enormous amounts of private research.

The takeaway here is getting money into the hands of smarter and more motivated people.

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miki123211 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's a problem of incentives.

Governments have a limited (although large) budget, and no incentive to spend it well[1]. You don't get promoted as a government administrator if you approve a Nobel-prize-winning grannt.

If you don't get rewarded for good work but may get punished for taking risks, you optimize for risk minimization, even if this means a lot of potentially-good work not getting done.

Nobody blames the FDA when millions of people die from the-medicine-hasn't-been-invented-yet-itis, everybody blames the FDA when ten or so people die from a side effect nobody saw. This impacts FDA policy.

This person has the best incentive there is in the world, the incentive to live. He didn't care whether the people getting his money correctly filled form 437-F, or whether they have the relevant paperwork that verifies their legitimacy in a way which can be described by legal rules.

[1] Incidentally, finance has (had?) the opposite problem. If your bonus is calculated as min(0, percentage * profit_generated), you will maximize risk, optimizing for bets that give you great returns most of the time, but wipe you out completely some of the time, as your losses are clamped to 0.

	▲	15 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
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	▲	kelnos 16 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> If your bonus is calculated as min(0, percentage profit_generated)* I assume you meant `max(...)`? Otherwise you will at best get zero dollars in bonus, and at worst owe your employer money. ;) (I get min/max backward all the time too.)

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light_hue_1 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No we absolutely don't. The US hardly spends anything on research.

The entire yearly budget for the National Cancer Institute is $7 billion dollars. To put this in perspective, that's 3 days of funding the DoD. For cancer. That kills well over half a million Americans per year.

The takeaway is that we should invest in research rather than letting people die.

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PowerElectronix 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

We are not the bosses of the people in the government, so asking does very little.

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BobbyJo 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can't compare the output of small teams driven by a fanatic with a single output metric with government funded research. NIH invests about 40 billion in research a year in the US as it is I believe.

	▲	melling 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I asked Gemini AI and it says the NIH spent $7.3 billion last year. Would it be a big deal to double that?

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georgemcbay 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The US government [...] could find that amount of money every year.

Sorry, that money is already earmarked for killing Iranian school girls and funding a gestapo to terrorize immigrants and American citizens. Ain't got enough left over after we cover those essentials.

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VectorLock 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In another timeline they're doing a "Cancer Moonshot" right now.

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3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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